Ten minutes before the class is to begin, a scattering of students discuss the upcoming assignments. "I'm getting a bit excited about my project," says one, qualifying his enthusiasm in typical Canadian fashion. Another nods in agreement, and they trade ideas about information sources and angles of research. Soon, the room is packed, voices are buzzing, lunches are being polished off; but when the teacher enters and flips on the overhead projector, he has a rapt audience.
Professor Tom Naylor looks wiry and youthful, despite being a veteran of twenty-six years at McGill. He launches into today's lecture, which he calls "Reefer Madness," by summarizing North American prohibition movements, and then moves into a detailed analysis of the marijuana industry. Naylor speaks without notes or hesitation, explaining history (from a 1611 law in the Virginia colonies which stated that it was against the law not to grow cannabis, through the thriving hemp industry of the nineteenth century, to the 1937 law which criminalized production and drove the industry underground), telling stories of intrigue, outlining failed attempts to regulate traffic, and addressing the students' questions. For an hour and a half the audience remains focussed on the figure at the front of the class, who gestures with one arm while resting the other on the projector.
ECON 316 is an unassuming label, but "Underground Economies" is, according to Maclean's annual university issue, one of the "hot" courses at McGill. For students attending Naylor's lectures, economics seems far from being the "dismal science" that John Kenneth Galbraith designated it. However, the professor is sceptical of the acclaim (healthy scepticism being a typical Naylor trait). "It isn't very flattering," he explains, "but this course lends itself to sensationalism. Students love to hear stories about drug dealers and gangsters." But, he adds, "You can't help being mesmerized by stories of great counterfeiters and credit card scams and so on. Whether you hate these people and want to put them in jail, or decide to model your life after them, you have to admire them for doing their jobs so well."
But there is a further attraction that the good students home in on: this material matters. It touches on their day-to-day existence. "I get a lot of students looking for something that is relevant to their lives," he says. Underground economies fit the bill; they exist all around us, from small-time drug dealers to insider stock-traders to massive corporate scam artists. And their impact on society can be enormous.
The importance of the underground economy cannot be measured in its size, Naylor argues. "You can't say how big it is because if it's working well, you can't see it. You're in an epistemological quandary." The issue, he says, is a moral question rather than a quantitative one. The creation of underground economies is a breach of civil society, a betrayal of the shared investment people have in making a society work for everyone. They create wealth without distributing it; the acceptance of such economies endangers the integrity of society.
Naylor's assertions run against the grain of much economic thought. "Of course," complains Naylor, "economics pretends that it doesn't deal with morality even though much of it simply dishes up free-market propaganda and pretends that it's objective science." The professor insists on giving facts, but tells students to be wary of everything they hear from official sources: governments, businesses, police forces, even himself. He is fond of quoting Yossarian in Catch-22, a book he claims to have read twenty-two times: "Between me and every ideal I see people cashing in. That kind of ruins the ideal." Scepticism and an inquiring mind become the best approach to official claims to truth, and the best defence for a civil society.
Public discussion is another critical practice for defending society, and forms an important element of Naylor's crusade for integrity in economic practices. Tap his name into the database for most Canadian libraries, and quite likely several titles will pop up. Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, published in 1987, deals with the shady side of the international economy: gunrunners, drug dealers, white collar criminals and corrupt and misguided government policy makers. His most recent book, Patriots and Profiteers, was released by McClelland and Stewart last year and investigates international politics and economic sanctions. The book is entertaining, like his classes, teaching by narrative and anecdote.
